Notice that there is an output Herschel that needs to be deleted before it releases its first natural glider. Is it possible to use p4 sparkers to convert this Herschel into a glider (or, ideally, 2 gliders)? Can the other end of the track be supported by only 2 glider streams and some p4 sparkers?

Edit: It's possible to get 3 gliders out of the end of the track using the fast H-to-2G, but the streams seem to be too close together to separate:

Regarding a potential p52 gun, the original p52 reflector creates a large piece of debris that needs to be deleted by an eater3. Crashing a glider into the debris or applying a p4 sparker might give something useful. Here's a 180-degree reflection reaction that seems useless:

83bismuth38 wrote:OH MY GOODNESS IS THIS A NEW PHOENIX(technically it's not an expansion of phoenix 1): ... EDIT: what about this?: ... or this: ...

It is ridiculously easy to create period 2 oscillators by combining small pieces together as one would toy train tracks. It's even easy to create glider syntheses of rectangular phoenixes like your last two examples. I have syntheses for those two that were last updated in 2002, and I think Dave Buckingham first synthesized them in the 1990s or earlier. You should familiarize yourself with some of the existing pattern collections, like jslife. You will find many expandable oscillators like this one there.

A long time ago I did some investigations into Period 2 oscillators, trying to classify the various rotors and their constituent parts, and understand how to fit those parts together. I've still got some pages I last edited back in 2006 at http://pentadecathlon.com/rotors/rotors.php?page=0 on this subject.

Also, somewhere in these forums I posted a few RLE patterns showing some of the large oscillators that can be constructed from all of these parts. They demonstrated that there's a lot of very simple parts that can be combined together in fairly complicated ways.

Also, Nicolai Beluchenko published "Oscichemistry" back around 2004, a more developed investigation into this topic. I think David Greene made that available on his server, and I'm sure there are links to it floating around here.

hkoenig wrote:Also, Nicolai Beluchenko published "Oscichemistry" back around 2004, a more developed investigation into this topic. I think David Greene made that available on his server, and I'm sure there are links to it floating around here.

Wow! I wish it had been p41 instead of p46, but maybe that will be the next new high-period oscillator. Meanwhile -- very nice phi spark! And obviously pretty simple to construct, though I don't think slmake can quite do it without a few hints added to the bespoke folder.

Was that a case of finding a clearly hopeless PL38P conduit, and then thinking, "No, that PR8P conduit couldn't possibly make that connection"... and then it did? Or did you run a speculative search for something to move the PR8P output back to its input?

dvgrn wrote:Wow! I wish it had been p41 instead of p46, but maybe that will be the next new high-period oscillator. Meanwhile -- very nice phi spark! And obviously pretty simple to construct, though I don't think slmake can quite do it without a few hints added to the bespoke folder.

Was that a case of finding a clearly hopeless PL38P conduit, and then thinking, "No, that PR8P conduit couldn't possibly make that connection"... and then it did? Or did you run a speculative search for something to move the PR8P output back to its input?

Closer to the latter--I'd wanted to restore a block near a PR8P in such a way that a glider could make a matching Pi for a new G-to-X, but then I was tweaking one of the search results and the thing started oscillating on me. I'll be happy even if nothing else comes out of that search.